In Ashley Hickson-Lovence's debut novel, a seventy-year-old man spends a single weekend in a cottage trying to finish a short story, and in doing so, confronts the accumulated weight of three marriages, three estranged children, and a lifetime of self-inflicted solitude. The book arrives from a writer who carries his own family's history of abandonment — biracial children given up in 1950s Ireland — and that inheritance quietly shapes the novel's emotional architecture. Hickson-Lovence asks what it means to be failed by those who made you, and to fail in turn those you have made, and whether l